If there are dumb, average and smart people and they can answer up to and including dumb, average and smart questions then you if you have an exam with two dumb questions and an average one then the final scores are:

d/a/s get 2/2/3 marks each and the IQ distribution magically disappears

However if you ask one dumb question, one average and one smart the final scores are:

d/a/s get 1/2/3 marks each and the IQ distribution reappears.

It’s amazing.

The state education system in the UK is currently based on this magic trick.

Truman was never re-elected. He assumed office on the death of Roosevelt, was elected to his own term in1948. In 1952 he chose not to run for re-election. Wonder who would have won an Eisenhower/Truman race?

@Jim. Actually, Jefferson built the beginnings of our navy in response to uh “North African” pirates. The only thing that seems to have proven worse than doing nothing in the ME is doing something. It’s where good intentions go to die. Bad intentions, too. We keep believing they will think like us if we just give them a chance and a firm handshake.

Atheist – Yes I knew that Truman was only elected once. But since he was an incumbent in 1948 I used the word reelect which is not the right word. Truman was advised by the State Department to stay out of the Arab-Israeli conflict and advised by his political advisors to support the Israelis in order to secure the Jewish vote. Given a choice between the national interest and his personal political interest he made his choice. We are still paying for his decision.

Of course, why it’s not in our national interest to have the support of a friendly democracy in that part of the world, I’m not sure; unless you think we need to mollify a bunch of crazed Islamic fanatics:

J. S. Stalin supported the establishment of Israel because he thought it would mean trouble for the Western powers – which in those days meant Great Britain, but nowadays means the US.
The Czechs sent 34,500 Mauser rifles, 5000 MG34 machine guns, 900 vz. 37 heavy machine guns.

And at this point in his life, it’s only fair to point out that Stalin knew what he was doing. Trouble was his business.

There were quite a few people who agreed with Stalin in thinking that the establishment of the State of Israel was not in the interests of the US. You may have heard of some of them. George Marshall,James Forrestal, George F. Kennan, John J. McCloy, Paul Nitze, and Dean Acheson all thought it a mistake. Marshall thought it was a really, really bad idea – ” I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President.” When the US did recognize Israel, Marshall had to send someone to the United Nations to keep the entire US delegation from resigning.

Israel has of course been a huge strategic burden on the US. Everyone knows this. Stalin was right.

The Zionists were (and many of them still are) just as fanatic as Muslims (who, btw, were actually mostly nonreligious secular types those days): after all, they managed to get rid of most of the Arabic pop in just a few months.

Supporting them because they’re internally democratic is as much in the US interest as it was for the Habsburgs to support the Ottomans against Venice, because the Ottomans were also a monarchy. Or the Papal State should also have supported the Ottomans, bc they were also theocratic, with the sultan doubling as caliph. Btw (along these lines) why did the US withdraw support from the only democracy in Africa, namely Apartheid SA?